Madeleine
Madeleine -- known alternately as Midge or Madge by her friends -- does not recall when she was born. She does not recall her parentage, her origins, or her real name. Curiously, for one who has forgotten that much, she has a keen memory nowadays, and can call a good many on their selective memories. Her earliest memory is waking up inside a coffin, in the middle of a dining room floor, surrounded by five other girls at varying ages from six to twelve. Madeleine herself was six at this time, and eah girl introduced themselves with a smile. They all wore crisp, clean white uniforms and were mature and composed for their ages. This was Madeleine's home: one house of many that hosted all girls, scattered throughout the woods and surrounding a massive girls' school. This property was protected -- or was it trapped? -- by a massive brick wall. There was no evident way in or out. None of the girls knew how the coffins arrived, but knew only that they arrived every year at the peak of summer, and that they always caried a single girl of six. None of these girls remembered their lives before the school, and all awoke from a mysterious sleep upon arrival. No girl ever saw a man in her time there. Madeleine was a mysterious girl from the start, however: many girls had quaint talents, and Madeleine possessed a unique ability of vision and of a strange type of telekinesis that grew more powerful as she became older. An extreme rarity, however, was that she was in complete control of it -- everything but the visions, that was. They came unbidden, in her sleep, during the day, and were disturbing: people wth missing limbs, bleeding freely; mutant humans with extra arms, or no eyes, or bulbous growths, or leprosy; people strapped to tables with their bellies cut open; the severed heads of children; animals who wore their insides on the outside of their bodies, feebly twitching and moaning; and many others. These images quietly disturbed her, and it was quickly noted that she was a quiet, introverted girl, inscrutable and almost always lost in her own thoughts. But the girls were all closely allied -- well, most of them -- and these girls sought to make her happy, not knowing of her ailment of sight, playing with her often and whispering juicy secrets about the Misses and the Headmistress and the janitoresses. Because of her quietude, none of the teachers or grown-up ladies ever suspected her of anything, and so many girls confided all their naughty deeds and thoughts to her, and she enjoyed this confidence tremendously. There were days of much laughter and squealing, of healthy play in the lake or the woods or the field, and nights turned over in bed whispering and giggling. But when the other girls hadn't the time or disposition to speak with her, the visions still came. While there were many days of play and jubilance, the girls were hard workers and avid learners. The only thing prized as much as or above academic learning was that of music and dance, and because of her clarity of focus, Madeleine excelled especially at these arts and enjoyed them tremendously. Her gifted mind could tune in perfectly to notes, to rhythms, and memorized steps uncannily. She was also a beautiful girl: her hair was long and platinum, her skin like porcelain, her eyes pale, and her body built elegant and thin, just as a dancer's should be. Many aid that if it weren't for her lack of colour, she could have passed as an Easterner for her body type. But for all her talent, Madeleine lacked severely in one area: the area of emotional expression. Except for some giggling and fun-having, she was silent and almost stoic, her face betraying no thoughts -- even her giggles were modest. It was thought that her underlying abilities kept her so, but she was just a reserved girl... though as the years passed, she did become more and more bitter. By the time she hit thirteen, Madeleine knew she could get away with just about anything, and she did so well. She often conspired with like-minded girls, sneaking out at night when none were supposed to, and meeting up in the woods to talk naughty things about the Mistresses and about what might lie outside the wall, writing poetry, singing songs and the like. She would sneak into the kitchens at night and steal away back to the dormitory rooms with snacks. When she was fifteen, she began doing more sinister things, like sending flashes of pictures into the minds of other girls she did not like, or sneaking around after hours and destroying their costumes, sabotaging some of the nastier Mistresses' belongings and equipment. All that time, no one ever suspected her, so smoothly did she run the operations and so well she kept her face arranged in its customary blankness. These days, it indeed was the visions that were driving her half-mad. They became more persistent, more violent, and kept her awake most nights -- the reason for her frequent shinanigans. Her abilities, too, increased in their potency, and when she was apprehended by anyone and grew frusterated, things would break, or explode, and sometimes even the water would burst from the pipes, miraculously frozen into ice. Fire would flare out and travel, things would shake. Once these unintentional outbursts began to happen, she was confronted more frequently and her friends began to shy away from her in a sad kind of fear, obviously upset to be so scared of her. Because of these things, she began to explode more often until it was finally decided, at the age of eighteen, that she was racking up too much debt in the school which had difficulty paying the bills anyway. So she was put to sleep, laid in a coffin, and sent away. She slept for many days and the place she awoke in was alien and frightening, a world of men, of fluorescent lights and smells of talcum and iodine and death. The feelings of despair and terror here were suffocating. She became an assistant to the head scientist, a mad one who acted chillingly sane and calm when conducting his experiments, when listening to the screams of his specimens. For all Madeleine knew, she was there to put her ability to good use, keeping the subjects calm and still, though not necessarily numb. Sometimes pity overtook her, though, and she would put them in a trance-like state in order that they would not be riddled with agony or shame. She saw much death there, and at night the nightmares were nearly driving her to suicide. The waking moments and the sleeping ones were indistinguishable from each other, both were so twisted and cruel. Only two months after being there, she declared that she would be leaving. But the good doctor always has a solution, and when he learned of her plan he stayed calm, played sympathy, and gave her a bottle of sleeping pills -- to help her sleep, he said. Many of the doctors and nurses here have this problem, he said. When she left, she could simply come back at any time to get a refill, and hopefully she would feel better after a while of decent sleep. But the medicine had a sinister purpose, one he plotted well, and a trap that Madeleine fell into as easily as a wingless bird. There still were nightmares, though now not so powerful, and when she awoke, she felt rested. Her equilibrium was off a bit and she was a bit fuzzy headed, but it had worked like a dream. Like a dream... a dangerous concoction of chemicals and drugs, extremely addictive, and numbing to the body. For five years Madeleine stayed on there, withdrawals from the drugs being too frightening and too crippling to miss any dosage. For those five years she never realized that she, along with being an assistant, had become a specimen herself. As the drugs did their work, the doctor would sleepwalk her out into a place he could examine her safely, and conducted many experiments regarding her abilities, her weaknesses, the weaknesses of others. In this state she was completely helpless, and a good many processes were conducted, a good many thoughts carried out... but some things are best left unsaid. It was her sharp memory that saved her, plagued though it was by the drugs, and she remembered bits and pieces of those incidents, many of which were frightening, or droll, or horribly shameful. Upon realizing that she had been tricked and taken advantage of all those years, Madeleine quietly frayed and snapped and one day simply walked away from the building without a word or a look back. Today she is still beautiful, but she is bitter and soured against the world which had trapped her in two different places for her entire life up to this point. Now she has trouble sleeping again, having since dropped the drugs (with great and painful difficulty, and not without health problems), and her eyes are often red-rimmed, but she says no word of complaint. She keeps her counsel, keeping quiet, but her intelligence still serves her well and she can still dance and sing like a dream -- she likes to girlishly fancy that there is a Siren somewhere in her ancestry. While she is very miserable and angry, she is gentle with everyone she meets: since she has been gone from the doctor, Madeleine feels the cold stab of guilt when she remembers that all those years she never saved a life, and that when she left, she selfishly left alone, aware though she was of the suffering of others. She fights an inner battle between her ego and her conscience, debating whether or not to go back and wholly kill the doctor and his staff, or to stay away where she will not be troubled by the memories and the smells and the oppressing atmosphere of misery. But, like so many others, Madeleine carries the misery with her anyway.